Top 10 Fastest Growing Crypto Ecosystems in 2021

Two years ago, Bitcoin dominated the crypto market, accounting for 70% of the industry’s value. But when the market cap topped $ 2 trillion, the industry had shrunk. Today Bitcoin’s market share is less than 40% and many new crypto networks are popping up every day. One of the ways to see how this industry will grow is to follow the software developers who build and maintain the cryptocurrency network.

“Developers tend to be pretty rational. They are constantly researching and developing new possibilities for their tools, ”said Avichal Garg, managing partner of the cryptocurrency-focused venture company Electric Capital. He regards the number of developers working on the network as “a leading indicator of the value that will be created and accumulated over the next 10 years” of a crypto project.

Garg, together with Maria Shen, partner at Electric Capital, publish reports which crypto platforms will attract the most developers in 2021. They used data from GitHub, an online repository where developers store code, to estimate the number of engineers. The total number of developers for the project may be less than the actual number as the report doesn’t show how much code is specifically written or how many engineers work at companies like Coinbase.

Their research says 18,000 active developers are working on crypto platforms, up from around 10,000 developers last year. Garg sees this increase as confirmation of the industry’s ability to grow and longevity.

Kinjal Shah, an investor at Blockchain Capital, agrees that:

“If developers invest their time and effort in the project, it is a strong signal that they are trying to lay the groundwork and stick to the project in the long term.”

Electric Capital research analyzed nearly 500,000 code sets and 160 million code updates. It compares December 2020 to December 2021 to calculate growth. In the following list, a developer is considered a full-time employee if he performs at least 10 software updates per month.

Top 10 Fastest Growing Crypto Market Ecosystems | Source: Electric Capital

The fastest growing platforms are all competitors of Ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrency network that started in 2015 and employs 1,300 full-time developers involved in building applications. Ethereum acts as a decentralized computer on which applications from more than 5,000 “nodes” or computers can be created and maintained that validate transactions. The downside of the Ethereum network is that it can only process around 15 transactions per second (the Nasdaq exchange market averages around 20,000 transactions per second) and transaction fees can sometimes exceed $ 100.

All of these growing cryptocurrency networks use different decentralized methods and consensus protocols (algorithmic processes for transaction validation) than Ethereum. They process transactions faster and with lower fees, and most are not as decentralized as the Ethereum network.

Korea-based company Terra was founded by businessman Do Kwon and founded 4 years ago. The UST stablecoin, a dollar-pegged cryptocurrency, has grown rapidly and has reached a market valuation of $ 10 billion, making it one of the top five stablecoins in the world.

San Francisco-based Solana surprised many in last year’s crypto wars as it attracted hundreds of developers and received strong support from crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried. A wide range of applications based on Solana, from cryptocurrency exchanges and credit products to music applications, has become very popular. Solana’s SOL token, which rose from $ 1.85 in January 2021 to $ 170 at the end of last year, is now in the region of $ 141 with a market cap of $ 43.9 billion please.

Near, the protocol was founded in 2017 in the Bay Area by Alexander Skidanov and Illia Polosukhin, two engineers who worked on the MemSQL distributed database system and Google’s TensorFlow machine learning platform. Both Solana and Near are created with Rust, a more widely used programming language than Solidity, which is based on Ethereum.

Solana and Near have also been active in providing grants to software developers when they agree to build apps on their respective systems. Near announced an $ 800 million funding program in October, and former Circle CMO Marieke Flament became CEO of the Near Foundation that year.

Meanwhile, the EOS platform has lost a significant number of developers, down from around 125 active developers (both full-time and part-time) in December 2020 to 80 in December 2020 the following year. In 2018, EOS rose to fame in the crypto community when it ran a $ 4 billion ICO fundraiser and was subsequently fined $ 24 million by the SEC for providing unregistered securities services had. The company does not recognize or deny this allegation.

In addition to the fastest growing networks, Electric Capital’s study also lists the network with the largest total number of developers. Ethereum has long held the top spot, and every fourth new crypto developer chooses to build apps on top of Ethereum.

Top 10 Cryptocurrency Market Ecosystem | Source: Electric Capital

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